• August 8, 2008

Facebook has tripled its audience in Japan over the last year, but the social network still lags well behind homegrown competitor Mixi.

Facebook's traffic in Japan increased to 538,000 unique visitors in June compared to 172,000 in the year-earlier period. But it remains an also-ran next to Mixi.jp, which drew 12.7 million users in June. MySpace was a distant second with 1.2 million, followed by Google's Orkut at 638,000, just ahead of Facebook.

Over the last year, Facebook has surpassed MySpace in traffic globally, at 132 million monthly visitors to 117.5 million. A recent post by a Japanese contributor on TechCrunch noted that Facebook had taken four years to introduce a localized version of the site, in which time Mixi became the category leader in Japan a $1 billion-listed company.

With the recent launch of a Japanese-language version of Facebook, however, Maru Sato, the managing director of comScore Japan, said competition was heating up in the market. Facebook also announced next month that it would begin to let developers worldwide translate applications into their own languages.

One trend in favor of Mixi's social networking competitors in Japan is that its traffic has been essentially flat over the last year. But Facebook and the rest have a long way to go to catch up.--Mark Walsh